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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISON 







MACMILLAN AND CO. 

[J)\T>ON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1896 



A /I rights reserved 






Copyright, 1896, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



Nortoooti ^^ress 

J. S. Cufhin^ & Co. - Berwick , 
Norwood .Niass. U.S. A 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.^ 

More than three years have come and gone since, 
amongst April blossoms, an English Master in the litera- 
ture of Italy was laid in his premature grave, within that 
most pathetic and most sacred spot of Rome where lie 
so many famous Englishman. 'They gave us,' wrote his 
daughter in a beautiful record of the last scene, ' they 
gave us a little piece of ground close to the spot where 
Shelley lies buried. In all the world there surely is no 
place more penetrated with the powers of poetry and 
natural beauty.' All travellers know how true is this : 
few spots on earth possess so weird a power over the 
imagination. It is described by Horatio Brown in the 
volume from which I have been quoting,^ 'the grave is 
within a pace of Trelawny's and a hand-touch of Shelley's 
Cor Cordi?im, in the embrasure of the ancient city walls.' 
Fit resting-place for one who of all the men of our genera- 
tion best knew, loved, and understood the Italian genius in 
literature ! 

There are not wanting signs that the reputation of 
J. Addington Symonds had been growing apace in his 
latest years, it has been growing since his too early death, 
and I venture a confident belief that it is yet destined to 
grow. His later work is to my mind far stronger, richer, 
and more permanent than his earlier work — excellent as 

1 Copyright by Macmillan & Co. in England. 

2 yohn Addington Symonds : a Biography. By Horatio F. Brown. With 
portraits and other illustrations, in two vols. 8vo. London, 1895. 



2 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

• 

is almost all his prose. Even the learning and brilliancy 
of the Renaissance in Italy do not impress me with the 
same sense of his powers as his Benvejiuto Cellini, his 
Michelangelo, his last two volumes of Essays, Speculative 
and Suggestive (1890), and some passages in the posthu- 
mous Antobiography ^vci^o^x^A in the Life by H. F. Brown. 
For grasp of thought, directness, sureness of judgment, 
the Essays of 1890 seem to me the most solid things that 
Symonds has left. He grew immensely after middle age 
in force, simplicity, depth of interest and of insight. He 
pruned his early exuberance ; he boldly grasped the great 
problems of life and thought ; he spoke forth his mind 
with a noble courage and signal frankness. He was lost 
to us too early : he died at fifty-two, after a life of inces- 
sant suffering, constantly on the brink of death, a life 
maintained, in spite of all trials, with heroic constancy 
and tenacity of purpose. And as we look back now we 
may wonder that his barely twenty years of labour under 
such cruel obstacles produced so much. For I reckon 
some forty works of his, great and small, including at 
least some ten important books of prose in some twenty 
solid volumes. That is a great achievement for one who 
was a permanent invalid and was cut off before old age. 

The publication of his Life by his friend H. F. Brown, 
embodying his own AutobiograpJiy and his Letters, has 
now revealed to the public what even his friends only 
partly understood, how stern a battle for life was waged 
by Symonds from his childhood. His inherited delicacy 
of constitution drove him to pass the larger part of his 
life abroad, and at last compelled him to make his home 
in an Alpine retreat. The pathetic motto and preface 
he prefixed to his Essays (1890) shows how deeply he 
felt his compulsory exile — evperiicov elvai (fiacn rrjv iprifxiav 
— 'solitude,' they say, 'favours the search after truth' — 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 3 

'The Essays,' he declares, 'written in the isolation of this 
Alpine retreat (Davos-Platz, 1890) express the opinions 
and surmisings of one who long has watched in solitude, 
"as from a ruined tower," the world of thought, and cir- 
cumstance, and action.' And he goes on to speak of his 
* prolonged seclusion from populous cities and the society 
of intellectual equals ' — a seclusion which lasted, with 
some interruptions, for more than fifteen years. And 
during a large part of his life of active literary produc- 
tion, a period of scarcely more than twenty years, he 
was continually incapacitated by pain and physical pros- 
tration, as we now may learn from his AiUobiography and 
Letters. They give us a fine picture of intellectual energy 
overcoming bodily distress. How few of the readers who 
delighted in his sketches of the columbines and asphodels 
on the Monte Generoso, and the vision of the Propylsea 
in moonlight, understood the physical strain on him whose 
spirit bounded at these sights and who painted them for 
us with so radiant a brush. 

Symonds, I have said, grew and deepened immensely 
in his later years, and it was only perhaps in the very 
last decade of his life that he reached the full maturity 
of his powers. His beautiful style, which was in early 
years somewhat too luscious, too continuously florid, too 
redolent of the elaborated and glorified prize-essay, grew 
stronger, simpler, more direct, in his later pieces, though 
to the last it had still some savour of the fastidious liter- 
ary recluse. In the Catholic Reaction (1886), in the Essays 
(1890), in the posthumous AiUobiography (begun in 1889), 
he grapples with the central problems of modern society 
and philosophic thought, and has left the somewhat dilet- 
tante tourist of the Cornice and Ravenna far, far behind 
him. As a matter of style, I hold the Benvenuto Cellini 
(of 1888) to be a masterpiece of skilful use of language: 



4 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

SO that the inimitable Memoirs of the immortal vagabond 
read to us now like an original of Smollett. It is far the 
most popular of Symonds's books, in large part no doubt 
from the nature of the work, but it is in form the most 
racy of all his pieces ; and the last thing that anyone 
could find in it would be any suggestion of academic 
euphuism. Had Symonds from the first written with that 
verve and mother-wit, his readers doubtless would have 
been trebled. 

It has been an obstacle to the recognition of Symonds's 
great merits that until well past middle life he was known 
to the public only by descriptive and critical essays in 
detached pieces, and these addressed mainly to a scholarly 
and travelled few, whilst the nervous and learned works 
of his more glowing autumn came towards the end of his 
life on a public rather satiated by exquisite analysis of 
landscape and poems. Even now, it may be said, the 
larger public are not yet familiar with his exhaustive work 
on Michelangelo, his latest Essays, and his Autobiografhy 
and Letters. In these we see that to a vast knowledge of 
Italian literature and art, Symonds united a judgment of 
consummate justice and balance, a courageous spirit, and 
a mind of rare sincerity and acumen. 

His work, with all its volume in the whole, is strictly 
confined within its chosen fields. It concerns Greek 
poetry, the scenery of Italy and Greece, Italian literature 
and art, translations of Greek and Italian poetry, volumes 
of lyrics, critical studies of some English poets, essays in 
philosophy and the principles of art and style. This in 
itself is a considerable field, but it includes no other part 
of ancient or modern literature, no history but that of 
the Renaissance, no trace of interest in social, political, 
or scientific problems. In the pathetic preface of 1890, 
Symonds himself seems fully to recognise how much he 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 5 

was used to survey the world of things from a solitary 
peak. His work then is essentially, in a peculiar degree 
for our times, the work of a student, looking at things 
through books, from the point of view of literature, and 
for a literary end — ov irpa^i^ aWa yvMaL<^ is his motto. 
And this gospel is always and of necessity addressed to 
the few rather than to the mass. 

I. Critical and Descriptive Essays. 

Until Symonds was well past the age of thirty-five — 
7ie/ mrsso del carmmin — he was known only by his very 
graceful pictures of Italy and his most scholarly analysis 
of Greek poetry. I have long been wont to regard his 
two series of The Greek Poets (1873, 1876) as the classical 
and authoritative estimate of this magnificent literature. 
These studies seem to me entirely right, convincing, and 
illuminating. There is little more to be said on the sub- 
ject ; and there is hardly a point missed or a judgment to 
be reversed. He can hardly even be said to have over- 
rated or under-rated any important name. And this is 
the more remarkable in that Symonds ranges over Greek 
poetry throughout all the thirteen centuries which separate 
the Iliad from Hero and Leander ; and he is just as 
lucidly judicial whether he deals with Hesiod, Empedocles, 
yEchylus, or Menander. 

Symonds was certainly far more widely and profoundly 
versed in Greek poetry than any Englishman who in our 
day has analysed it for the general reader. And it is 
plain that no scholar of his eminence has been master of 
a style so fascinating and eloquent. He has the art of 
making the Greek poets live to our eyes as if we saw in 
pictures the scenes they sing. A fine example of this 
power is in the admirable essay on Pindar in the first 



6 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

series, when he describes the festival of Olympia as Pin- 
dar saw it. And we who have been trying to get up a 
thrill over the gate-money ' sports ' in the Stadium of 
Athens may turn to Symonds's description of the Olympic 
games of old — * a festival in the fullest sense of the word 
popular, but at the same time consecrated by religion, dig- 
nified by patriotic pride, adorned with Art.' And he gives 
us a vivid sketch of the scene in the blaze of summer, 
with the trains of pilgrims and deputies, ambassadors 
and athletes, sages, historians, poets, painters, sculptors, 
wits and statesmen — all thronging into the temple of 
Zeus to bow before the chryselephantine masterpiece of 
Pheidias. 

These very fine critical estimates of the Greek poets 
would no doubt have had a far wider audience had they 
been from the first more organically arranged, less full of 
Greek citations and remarks intelligible only to scholars. 
As it is, they are studies in no order, chronological or 
analytic ; for Theocritus and the Anthologies come in the 
first series, and Homer and ^schylus in the second. The 
style too, if always eloquent and picturesque, is rather too 
continuously picturesque and eloquent. Co7i espressione 
sostennta — is a delightful variety in a sonata, but we also 
crave a scJierzo, and adagio and prestissimo passages. 
Now, Symonds, who continually delights us with fine 
images and fascinating colour, is too fond of satiating us 
with images and with colour, till we long for a space of 
quiet reflection and neutral good sense. And not only are 
the images too constant, too crowded, and too luscious — 
though, it must be said, they are never incongruous or 
commonplace — but some of the- very noblest images are 
apt to falter under their own weight of ornament. 

Here is an instance from his Pindar — a grand image, 
perhaps a little too laboriously coloured : — 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 7 

He who has watched a sunset attended by the passing of a thunder- 
storm in the outskirts of the Alps, who has seen the distant ranges of 
the mountains alternately dbscured by cloud and blazing with the con- 
centrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and 
rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe 
peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flame-irradiated 
vapour — who has heard the thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of 
hills, and watched the lightning, like a snake^s tongue, flicker at inter- 
vals amid gloom and glory — knows in Nature's language what Pindar 
teaches with the voice of Art. 

And, not content with this magnificent and very just 
simile, Symonds goes on to tell us how Pindar ' combines 
the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the 
torrent, the richness of Greek wine, the majestic pageantry 
of Nature in one of her sublimer moods.' This is too 
much : we feel that, if the metaphors are not getting 
mixed, they form a draught too rich for us to quaff. 

Symonds has, however, an excellent justification to offer 
for this pompous outburst, that he was anxious to give us 
a vivid sense of Pindar's own 'tumidity — an overblown 
exaggeration of phrase,' for * Pindar uses images like 
precious stones, setting them together in a mass, without 
caring to sort them, so long as they produce a gorgeous 
show.' We all know how dangerous a model the great 
lyrist may become — 

Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari, 
lule, ceratis ope Daedalea 
Nititur pinnis, vitreo daturus 
Nomina ponto. — 

Symonds sought to show us something of Pindar's ' fiery 
flight, the torrent-fullness, the intoxicating charm ' of his 
odes : and so he himself in his enthusiasm ' fervet, im- 
mensusque ruit prof undo ore.' 

Whenever Symonds is deeply stirred with the nobler 



8 JOHN ADDINGTOX SYMONDS. 

• 

types of Greek poetry, this dithyrambic mood comes on 
him, and he gives full voice to the God within. Here 
is a splendid symphony called forth by the Trilogy of 
yEschylus : — 

There is, in the Aga7nemnoii^ an oppressive sense of multitudinous 
crimes, of sins gathering and swelling to produce a tempest. The air 
we breathe is loaded with them. No escape is possible. The mar- 
shalled thunderclouds '^roll ever onward, nearer and more near, and far 
more swiftly than the foot can flee. At last the accumulated storm 
bursts in the murder of Agamemnon, the majestic and unconscious 
victim, felled like a steer at the stall ; in the murder of Cassandra, who 
foresees her fate, and goes to meet it with the shrinking of some) dumb 
creature, and with the helplessness of one who knows that doom may 
not be shunned ; in the lightning-flash of Clytemnestra's arrogance, 
who hitherto has been a glittering hypocrite, but now proclaims herself 
a fiend incarnate. As the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto 
has fallen drop by drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus : 
but the end is not yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister 
when we regard it as the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture 
to fresh symphonies and similar catastrophies. Wave after wave of 
passion gathers and breaks in these stupendous scenes ; the ninth wave 
mightier than all, with a crest whereof the spray is blood, falls foaming ; 
over the outspread surf of gore and ruin the curtain drops, to rise upon 
the self-same theatre of new woes. 

This unquestionably powerful picture of the Agamemnon 
opens with a grand trumpet-burst that Ruskin might envy 
— 'an oppressive sense of multitudinous crimes' — 'the air 
we breathe is loaded with them ' — ' Agamemnon, the 
majestic and unconscious victim, felled like a steer at 
the stall ' — Cassandra with the shrinking of some dumb 
creature — Clytemnestra, the glittering hypocrite, the fiend 
incarnate. Down to this point the passage is a piece of 
noble English, and a true analysis of the greatest of pure 
tragedies. But when we come to the rain of blood, the 
waves with their spray of blood, the * outspread surf of 
gore,' we begin to feel exhausted and satiated with horror, 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 9 

and the whole terrific paragraph ends in something peril- 
ously near to bathos. I have cited this passage as a char- 
acteristic example of Symonds in his splendid powers and 
his besetting weakness — his mastery of the very heart of 
Greek poetry, and his proneness to redundancy of orna- 
ment; his anxiety to paint the lily and to gild the refined 
gold of his own pure and very graceful English. 

I have always enjoyed the Sketches in Italy and Greece 
(1874) and the Sketches and Studies in Italy (1879) ^s de- 
lightful reminiscences of some of the loveliest scenes on 
earth. They record the thoughts of one who was at once 
scholar, historian, poet, and painter — painter, it is true in 
words, but one who saw Italy and Athens as a painter 
does, or rather as he should do. The combination is very 
rare, and, to those who can follow the guidance, very fas- 
cinating. The fusion of history and landscape is admirable : 
the Siena, the Perugia, the Palermo, Syracuse, Rimini, and 
Ravenna, with their stories of S. Catherine, the Baglioni, 
the Normans of Hauteville, Nicias and Demosthenes, the 
Malatesti, and the memories of the Pineta — are pictures 
that dwell in the thoughts of all who love these immortal 
spots, and should inspire all who do not know them with 
the thirst to do so. The Athens is quite an education in 
itself, and it makes one regret that it is the one sketch that 
Symonds has given us in Greece proper. To the cultured 
reader, he is the ideal cicerone for Italy. 

The very completeness and variety of the knowledge 
that Symonds has lavished on these pictures of Italian 
cities may somewhat limit their popularity, for he appeals 
at once to such a combination of culture that many readers 
lose something of his ideas. Passages from Greek, Latin, 
and Italian abound in them ; the history is never sacri- 
ficed to the landscape, nor the landscape to the poetry, nor 
the scholarship to the sunlight, the air, and the scents of 



lO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

flower or the sound of the waves and the torrents. All is 
there : and in this way they surpass those pictures of 
Italian scenes that we may read in Ruskin, George Eliot, 
or Professor Freeman. Freeman has not the poetry and 
colour of Symonds ; George Eliot has not his ease and 
grace, his fluidity of improvisation ; and Ruskin, with all 
his genius for form and colour, has no such immense and 
catholic grasp of history as a whole. 

But it cannot be denied that these Sketches, like the 
Greek Poets, are too continuously florid, too profusely col- 
oured, without simplicity and repose. The subjects admit 
of colour, nay, they demand it; they justify enthusiasm, 
and suggest a luxurious wealth of sensation. But their 
power and their popularity would have been greater, if 
their style had more light and shade, if the prosaic fore- 
ground and background had been set down in jog-trot 
prose. The high-blooded barb that Symonds mounts 
never walks : he curvets, ambles, caracoles, and prances 
with unfailing elegance, but with somewhat too monoto- 
nous a consciousness of his own grace. And there is a 
rather more serious weakness. These beautiful sketches 
are pictiLves, descriptions of what can be seen, not records 
of what has been felt. Now, it is but a very limited field 
indeed within which words can describe scenery. The 
emotions that scenery suggests can be given us in verse 
or in prose. Byron perhaps could not paint word-pictures 
like Symonds. But his emotions in a thunderstorm in the 
Alps, or as he gazes on the Silberhorn, his grand outburst 

in Rome 

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul! 
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, ' 
Lone mother of dead empires! 

strikes the imagination more than a thousand word-pictures. 
Ruskin's elaborate descriptions of Venice and Florence 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. II 

would not have touched us as they do, had he not made us 
feel all that Venice and Florence meant to him. This is 
the secret of Byron, of Goethe, even of Cormne and Trans- 
forniation. But this secret Symonds never learned. He 
paints, he describes, he tells us all he knoivs and what he 
has read. He does not tell us what he has felt, so as to 
make us feel it to our bones. Yet such is the only possible 
form of reproducing the effect of a scene. 

n. Italian Literature and Art, 

It will, I think, be recognised by all, that no English 
writer of our time has equalled Symonds in knowledge of 
the entire range of Italian literature from Guido Caval- 
canti to Leopardi, and none certainly has treated it with so 
copious and brilliant a pen. Thes even octavo volumes 
on the Italian Renaissance occupied him for eleven years 
1 875- 1 886); and besides these there are the two volumes 
on Michelangelo (1892), two volumes of Benvennto Cellini 
(1888), a volume on Boccaccio (1895), and the Son^iets of 
Michelangelo and Campanella (1878). And we must not 
forget the early essay on Dante (1872), and translations 
from Petrarch, Ariosto, Pulci, and many more. This con- 
stitutes an immense and permanent contribution to our 
knowledge, for it not only gives us a survey of Italian 
literature for its three grand centuries, but it presents such 
an ample analysis of the works reviewed that every reader 
can judge for himself how just and subtle are the judg- 
ments pronounced by the critic. The studies of Petrarch, 
Boccaccio, of the Humanists and Poliziano, of Michelan- 
gelo, Lionardo, Cellini, Ariosto and Tasso, are particularly 
full and instructive. The whole series of estimates is ex- 
haustive. To see how complete it is, one need only com- 
pare it with the brief summaries and dry catalogues of such 



12 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

a book as Hallam's Literature of Europe. Hallam gives 
us notes on Italian literature : Symonds gives us biogra- 
phies and synopses. 

This exhaustive treatment brings its own Nemesis. The 
magic fountain of Symonds's learning and eloquence pours 
on till it threatens to become a flood. We have almost 
more than we need or can receive. We welcome all that 
he has to tell us about the origins of Italian poetry, about 
Boccaccio and contemporary Novel/e, about the Orlando 
cycle and the pathetic, story of Tasso. And so, all that we 
learn of Machiavelli, Bruno, Campanella, Sarpi is exactly 
what we want, told us in exactly the way we enjoy. But 
our learned guide pours on with almost equal eloquence 
and detail into all the ramifications of the literature in its 
pedantry, its- decadence, its affectation. And at last the 
most devoted reader begins to have enough of the copyists 
of Dante and Boccaccio, of the HypjicrotoinacJiia and its 
brood, of Laude and Ballate, of Rispetti and Capitoli, and 
all the languishments and hermaphroditisms of Guarini, 
Berni, and Marino. Nearly four thousand pages charged 
with extracts and references make a great deal to master ; 
and the general reader may complain that they stoop to 
register so many conceits and so much filth. 

In all that he has written on Italian Art, Symonds has 
shown ripe knowledge and consummate judgment. The 
second volume of his Italian Reimissance is wholly given 
to Art, but he treats art incidentally in many other volumes, 
in the works on Michelangelo and Cellini and in very many 
essays. His MicJielangelo Buonarroti (1893) is a masterly 
production, going as it does to the root of the central prob- 
lems of great art. And his estimate of Cellini is singularly 
discriminating and sound. His accounts of the origin of 
Renaissance architecture, of Lionardo, of Luini, of Cor- 
reggio, and Giorgione are all essentially just and decisive. 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 13 

Indeed, in his elaborate survey of Italian art for three cen- 
turies from Nicolas of Pisa to Vasari, though few would 
venture to maintain that Symonds is always right, he would 
be a bold man who should try to prove that he was often 
wrong. 

But this is very far from meaning that Symonds has said 
everything, or has said the last word. The most cursory 
reader must notice how great is the contrast between the 
view of Italian art taken by Symonds and that taken by 
Ruskin. Not that they differ so deeply in judging specific 
works of art or even particular artists. It is a profound 
divergence of beliefs on religion, philosophy, and history. 
That Revival of Paganism which is abomination to Ruskin 
is the subject of Symonds's commemoration, and even of his 
modified admiration. The whole subject is far too complex 
and too radical to be discussed here. For my own part I 
am not willing to forsake the lessons of either. Both have 
an intimate knowledge of Italian art and its history — Rus- 
kin as a poet and painter of genius, Symonds as a scholar 
and historian of great learning and industry. Ruskin has 
passionate enthusiasm : Symonds has laborious impartiality, 
a cool judgment, and a catholic taste. Ruskin is an almost 
mediaeval Christian : Symonds is a believer in science and 
in evolution. 

The contrast between the two, which is admirably illus- 
trated by their different modes of regarding Raffaelle at 
Rome, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, is a fresh form 
of the old maxim — Both are right in what they affirm and 
wrong in what they deny. Ruskin's enthusiasm is lavished 
on the Catholic and chivalric nobleness of the thirteenth 
century ; Symonds's enthusiasm is lavished on the human- 
ity and the naturalism of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies. We accept the gifts of both ages and we will not 
dispense with either. Ruskin denounced Neo-classicism 



14 JOHN ADDINGTON SyMONDS. 

and the Humanism of the Renaissance ; Symonds denounced 
the superstition and inhumanity of MediaevaHsm. But 
Ruskin has shown us how unjust was Symonds to Catholi- 
cism, precisely as Symonds has shown us how unjust was 
Ruskin to the Renaissance. 

Let us thankfully accept the lessons of both these 
learned masters of literature and art. To Ruskin, the 
Renaissance is a mere episode, and a kind of local plague. 
With Symonds it is the centre of a splendid return to 
Truth and Beauty. Ruskin's point of view is far the wider : 
Symond's point of view is far the more systematic. Rus- 
kin is thinking of the religion and the poetry of all the 
ages : Symonds is profoundly versed in the literature and 
art of a particular epoch in a single country. Ruskin 
knows nothing and wishes to know nothing of the masses 
of literature and history which Symonds has absorbed. 
Symonds, on the other hand, despises a creed which 
teaches such superstitions, and a Church which ends in 
such corruptions. Spiritually, perhaps, Ruskin's enthusi- 
asms are the more important and the purer : philosophi- 
cally and historically, Symonds's enthusiasms are the more 
scientific and the more rational. Both, in their way, are 
real. Let us correct the one by the other. The Renais- 
sance was an indispensable progress in the evolution of 
Europe, and yet withal a moral depravation — full of im- 
mortal beauty, full also of infernal vileness, like the Sin of 
Milton, as she guarded Hell-gate. 

The Renaissance in Italy (alas ! why did he use this 
Frenchified word in writing in English of an Italian move- 
ment, when some of us have been struggling for years past to 
assert the pure English form of Renascence ?) — The Renais- 
sance in Italy is a very valuable and brilliant contribution 
to our literature, but it is not a complete book even yet, 
not an organic book, not a work of art. The volumes on 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. I 5 

Art and on Literature are in every way the best ; but even 
in these the want of proportion is very manifest. Cellini, 
in Symonds, occupies nearly five times the space given to 
Raffaelle, Barely fifteen pages (admirable in themselves) 
are devoted to Lionardo, whilst a whole chapter is devoted 
to the late school of Bologna. It is the same with the 
Literature. Pietro Aretino is treated with the same scru- 
pulous interest as Boccaccio or Ariosto. The HermapJiro- 
ditiis and the Adone are commemorated with as much care 
as the poems of Dante or Petrarch. A history of litera- 
ture, no doubt, must take note of all popular books, how- 
ever pedantic or obscene. But we are constantly reminded 
how very much Symonds is absorbed in purely literary 
interests rather than in social and truly historic interests. 
TJie Renaissance in Italy, if regarded as a survey of the 
part given by one nation to the whole movement of the 
Renascence in Europe over some two centuries and a half, 
has one very serious lacnna and defect. In all these seven 
volumes there is hardly one word about the science of the 
Renascence. Now, the revival for the modern world of 
physical science form the state to which Science had been 
carried by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hip- 
parchus in the ancient world was one of the greatest ser- 
vices of the Renascence — one of the greatest services 
ever conferred on mankind. And in this work Italy held 
a foremost part, if she did not absolutely lead the way. 
In Mathematics, Mechanics, Astronomy, Physics, Botany, 
Zoology, Medicine, and Surgery the Italians did much to 
prepare the ground for modern science. Geometry, Alge- 
bra, Mechanics, Anatomy, Geography, Jurisprudence, and 
General Philosophy owe very much to the Italian genius ; 
but of these we find nothing in these seven crowded vol- 
umes. Symonds has nothing to tell us of the wonderful 
tale of the rise of modern Algebra — of Tartaglia and 



l6 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

Cardan ; nothing of the origins of modern Geometry and 
Mechanics ; nothing of the school of Vesalius at Pavia, of 
Fallopius and Eustachius and the early Italian anatomists ; 
nothing of Caesalpinus and the early botanists ; nothing of 
Lilio and the reformed Calendar of Pope Gregory ; noth- 
ing of Alciati and the revival of Roman law. A whole 
chapter might have been bestowed on Lionardo as a man 
of science, and another on Galileo, whose physical discov- 
eries began in the sixteenth century. And a few pages 
might have been saved for Christopher Columbus. And 
it is the more melancholy that the great work out of which 
these names are omitted has room for elaborate disquisi- 
tions on the Rifacimento of Orlando, and a perfect New- 
gate Calendar of Princes and Princesses, Borgias, Cencis, 
Orsinis, and Accorambonis. Symonds has given us some 
brilliant analyses of the Literature and Art of Italy during 
three centuries of the Renascence. But he has not given 
us its full meaning and value in science, in philosophy, or 
in history, for he has somewhat misunderstood both the 
Middle Ages which created the Renascence and the Rev- 
olution which it created in turn, nor has he fully grasped 
the relations of the Renascence to both. 

III. Poems and Translations. 

It is impossible to omit some notice of Symonds's poetry, 
because he laboured at this art with such courage and 
perseverance, and has left so much to the world, besides, 
I am told, whole packets of verses in manuscript. He 
published some five or six volumes of verse, including his 
Prize Poem of i860, and he continued to the last to write 
poems and translations. But he was not a poet : he knew 
it — * I have not the inevitable touch of the true poet ' — 
he says very justly in his Aiitobiogimphy . Mattnew Arnold 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 1 7 

told him that he obtained the Newdigate prize not for the 
style of his Escorial — which, in its obvious fluency, is a 
quite typical prize poem — ' but because it showed an in- 
tellectual grasp of the subject.' That is exactly the truth 
about all Symonds's verses. They show a high intellectual 
grasp of the subject ; but they have not the inevitable 
touch of the true poet. 

These poems are very thoughtful, very graceful, very 
interesting, and often pathetic. They rank very high 
amongst the minor poetry of his time. They are full of 
taste, of ingenuity, of subtlety, nay, of beauty. There is 
hardly a single fault to be found in them, hardly a com- 
monplace stanza, not one false note. And yet, as he said 
with his noble sincerity, he has scarcely written one great 
line — one line that we remember, and repeat, and linger 
over. He frankly recalls how * Vaughan at Harrow told 
me the truth when he said that my besetting sin was 
"fatal facility.'" And at Balliol, he says, Jowett 'chid 
me for ornaments and mannerisms of style.' 

Symonds's poetry is free from mannerisms, but it has 
that 'fatal facility' — which no fine poetry can have. It 
is full of ornament — of really graceful ornament ; but it 
sadly wants variety, fire, the incommunicable ' form ' of 
true poetry. The very quantity of it has perhaps marred 
his reputation, good as most of it is regarded as minor 
poetry. But does the world want minor poetry at all t 
The world does not, much less minor poetry mainly on 
the theme of death, waste, disappointment, and doubt. 
But to the cultured few who love scholarly verse packed 
close with the melancholy musings of a strong brain and 
a brave heart, to Symonds's own friends and contempo- 
raries, these sonnets and lyrics will long continue to have 
charm and meaning. He said in the touching preface to 
Many Moods, 1878, dedicated to his friend, Roden Noel, 



l8 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

who has now rejoined him in the great Kingdom, he 
trusted 'that some moods of thought and feeUng, not 
elsewhere expressed by me in print, may live within the 
memory of men like you, as part of me ! ' It was a legiti- 
mate hope : and it is not, and it will not be, unfulfilled. 

The translations in verse are excellent. From transla- 
tions in verse we hardly expect original poetry; and it 
must be doubted if any translation in verse can be at 
once accurate, literal, and poetic. Symonds was a born 
translator : his facility, his ingenuity, his scholarly insight, 
his command of language prompted him to give us a pro- 
fusion of translations in verse, even in his prose writings. 
They are most of them as good as literal transcripts of 
a poem can be made. But they are not quite poetry. In 
Sappho's hymn to Aphrodite, Symonds's opening lines — 

Star-throned, incorruptible Aphrodite, 

Child of Zeus, wile-weaving, I supplicate thee — 

are a most accurate rendering ; but they do not give the 
melodious wail of — 

TTOiKiXoOpov, aOavar *A<f>p6SLTa, 
TTol A105, SoXoTrXoKC, XiacTOfxai ere. 

The Sonnets of Michelangelo and of Campanella, 1878, 
is a most valuable contribution to Italian literature. These 
most powerful pieces had never been translated into Eng- 
lish from the authentic text. They are abrupt, obscure, 
and subtle, and especially require the help of an expert. 
And in Symonds they found a consummate expert. 

IV. Philosophical and Religious Speculations. 

It was not until a few years before his death that 
Symonds was known as a writer on subjects other than 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. IQ 

History, Literature, and Art. But in his fiftieth year he 
issued in two volumes his Essays, Speculative and Sugges- 
tive, 1890. These, as I have said, are written in a style 
more nervous and simple than his earlier studies ; they 
deal with larger topics with greater seriousness and power. 
The essays on Evolution, on its Application to Literature 
a7td Art, on Prijiciples of Criticism on the Provinces and 
Relations of the Arts, are truly suggestive, as he claims 
them to be ; and are wise, ingenious, and fertile. The 
Notes on Style, on the history of style, national style, per- 
sonal style, are sound and interesting, if not very novel. 
And the same is true of what he has written of Expres- 
sion, of Caricature, and of our Elizabethan and Victorian 
poetry. 

The great value of Symonds's judgments about liter- 
ature and art arises from his uniform combination of 
comprehensive learning with judicial temper. He is very 
rarely indeed betrayed into any form of extravagance 
either by passionate admiration or passionate disdain. 
And he hardly ever discusses any subject of which he 
has not a systematic and exhaustive knowledge. His 
judgment is far more under the control of his emotions 
than is that of Ruskin, and he has a wider and more 
erudite familiarity with the whole field of modern litera- 
ture and art than had either Ruskin or Matthew Arnold. 
Indeed, we may fairly assume that none of his contem- 
poraries have been so profoundly saturated at once with 
classical poetry, Italian and Elizabethan literature, and 
modern poetry, English, French, and German. Though 
Symonds had certainly not the literary charm of Ruskin, 
or Matthew Arnold, perhaps of one or two others among 
his contemporaries, he had no admitted superior as a 
critic in learning or in judgment. 

But that which I find most interesting — I venture to 



20 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

think most important — in these later essays, in the Auto- 
biograpJiy and the Letters, is the frank and courageous 
handling of the eternal problems of Man and the Uni- 
verse, Humanity and its Destiny, the relations between 
the individual and the environment. All these Symonds 
has treated with a clearness and force that some persons 
hardly expected from the loving critic of Sappho, Poliziano, 
and Cellini. For my own part I know few things more 
penetrating and suggestive in this field than the essays on 
the PJiilosopJiy of Evolution and its applications, the A^ature 
Myths, Darwin s Thoughts about God, the Limits of Knozv- 
ledge, and Notes on TJieism. Symonds avows himself an 
Agnostic, rather tending towards Pantheism, in the mood 
of Goethe and of Darwin. As his friend puts it truly 
enough in the Biography — * Essentially he desired the 
warmth of a personal God, intellectually he could conceive 
that God under human attributes only, and he found him- 
self driven to say " No " to each human presentment of 
Him.' 

In his Essays and in the Autobiography Symonds has 
summed up his final beliefs, and it was right that on his 
grave-stone they should inscribe his favourite lines of 
Cleanthes which he was never tired of citing, which he 
said must be the form of our prayers : — 

Lead Thou me, God, Law, Reason, Motion, Life! 
All names alike for Thee are vain and hollow. 

But he separated himself from the professed Theists who 
assert ' that God must be a Person, a righteous Judge, a 
loving Ruler, a Father' (the italics are his — Notes on 
Theism. Essays, ii. p. 291). This is nearly the same as 
Matthew Arnold's famous phrase — 'the stream of tendency 
by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being ' — 
or ' the Eternal not ourselves that makes for righteous- 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 21 

ness.' And Matthew Arnold also could find no probable 
evidence for the belief that God is a Person. The reason- 
ing of Symonds in these later essays is not wholly unlike 
that which leads Herbert Spencer to his idea of the Un- 
knowable — ' the Infinite and Eternal Energy by which all 
things are created and sustained.' But Symonds's own 
belief tended rather more to a definite and moral activity 
of the Energy he could not define, and he was wont to 
^roup himself under Darwin rather than Spencer. 

He had reflected upon Comte's conception of Humanity 
as the supreme Power of which we can predicate certain 
knowledge and personal relations; and in many of his later 
utterances Symonds approximates in general purpose to 
that conception. His practical religion is always summed 
up in his favourite motto from Goethe — * im Ganzen, 
Guten, Schonen, resolut zu leben,' or in the essentially Posi- 
tivist maxim — tov^ ^covra^ ev 8pdv — do thy duty throughout 
this life. But it seems that the idea of Humanity had 
been early presented to him in its pontifical, not in its 
rational form. And a man who was forced to watch the 
busy world of men in solitude from afar was not likely to 
accept a practical religion of life for others — for Family, 
Country, and Humanity. It is possible that his eloquent 
relative who built in the clouds of Oxford Metaphysic so 
imposing a Nephelococcygia may have influenced him more 
than he knew. In any case, he sums up his 'religious 
evolution ' thus {Biography, ii. 132) : ' Having rejected dog- 
matic Christianity in all its forms. Broad Church, Angli- 
canism, the Gospel of Comte, Hegel's superb identification 
of human thought with essential Being, &c. &c. ... I came 
to fraternise with Goethe, Cleanthes, Whitman, Bruno, 
Darwin.' 

They who for years have delighted in those brilliant 
studies that Symonds poured forth on literature, art, criti- 



22 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

cism, and history should become familiar with the virile 
meditations he scattered through the Autobiography and 
Letters in the memoir compiled by Horatio Brown. They 
will see how steadily his power grew to the last both in 
thought and in form. His earlier form had undoubtedly 
tended to mannerism — not to euphuism or ' preciosity ' 
indeed — but to an excess of colour and saccharine. As 
he said of another famous writer on the Renaissance, we 
feel sometimes in these Sketches as if we were lost in 
a plantation of sugar-cane. But Symonds never was 
seriously a victim of the Circe of preciosity, she who turns 
her lovers into swine — of that style which he said ' has 
a peculiarly disagreeable effect on my nerves — like the 
presence of a civet cat.' He was luscious, not precious. 
His early style was vitiated by a fatal proneness to Rus- 
kinese. But at last he became virile and not luscious 
at all. 

And that other defect of his work — its purely literary 
aspect — he learned at last to develop into a definite social 
and moral philosophy. He was quite aware of his beset- 
ting fault. ' The fault of my education as a preparation 
for literature was that it was exclusively literary' {Auto- 
biograpJiy, i. 218). That no doubt is answerable for much 
of the shortcoming of his Renaissance^ the exaggeration of 
mere scandalous pedantry, of frigid conceits, and the entire 
omission of science. It is significant to read from one of 
Oxford's most brilliant sons a scathing denunciation of the 
superficial and mechanical 'cram' which Oxford still per- 
sists in calling its ' education ' {Autobiography, i, 218). 

It is a moving and inspiring tale is this story of the 
life of a typical and exemplary man of letters. Immense 
learning, heroic perseverance, frankness and honesty of 
temper, with the egoism incidental to all autobiographies 
and intimate letters, and in this case perhaps emphasised 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 23 

by a life of exile and disease, a long and cruel battle with 
inherited weakness of constitution, a bright spirit, and 
intellect alert, unbroken to the last. His friends will echo 
the words that Jowett wrote for his tomb : — 

Ave carissime! 

Nemo te magis in corde amicus fovebat, 

Nee in simplices et indoctos 

Benevolentior erat. l. ^ .1 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISON 






n •■■'.> 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1896 

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